Our night sky is teeming with exoplanets: Sara Seager on the hunt for another earth at TED2015

“Are we alone? Is there life out there?” asks Sara Seager on the stage in Session 4 of TED2015. “These questions have been around for thousands of years since the days of the Greek philosophers. I’m here to tell you just how close we are getting.”

Seager is a professor at MIT who has been referred to as “an astronomical Indiana Jones.” Despite naysayers who said what she was searching for didn’t even exist, her research helped lead to the discovery of the first planet outside our solar system — aka an exoplanet — with an atmosphere. Her latest instinct: that “orbiting stars far, far away,” there are other planets. Potentially one similar to Earth.

“Our sun is but one of many stars,” she says. “We know that every star has at least one planet … Our night…